Monday, December 20, 2010

Well bah my humbugs if'n it's not Christmas time...again! I've been way too busy spreading holiday cheer to do anything with Again With the Comics for the last couple of weeks, but here I am just in time for Christmas with a forgotten case from Batman's Secret Yule Files for your enjoyment. Indeed, everything that happens to Batman is in canon somehow, even that holiday playground parody favorite:

Friday, December 10, 2010

For such a heroic guy, Superman sure is a Machiavellian schemer. We recently covered his bizarre and convoluted Plan "J" in our coverage of Jimmy Olsen's Helmet of Hate, but as Pat of the Silver Age Comics Blog points out, that's just one of three wacky, overly- complex contingency plans the Man of Steel kept up his royal blue sleeve. Here's some information about Plan "L", which basically involved Lois Lane running around Metropolis kissing all of the other superheroes! Spoiler Alert: it turns out to be a zany hoax:

Then of course, there's Plan "P", which sadly does not involve Perry White locking lips with Green Arrow, but does include bondage and Kandorians. It's not quite as wacky as the first two, presumably since Perry didn't have his own comic, and therefore no need to explain why he had been turned into a baby or a hippie, or whatever on the cover. These two panels sum up Plan "P" pretty succinctly, in all their exposition-y glory:

Given Superman's obsessiveness, I'm surprised there wasn't a Plan "C" for Clark, with dual-action hoaxiness. First, to fend off whatever threat, and second, to throw Jimmy, Lois, and/or Perry off the scent of his secret identity just by having a Plan "C".

"(CHUCKLE!) IF ONLY LOIS KNEW THAT PLAN "C" WAS A DOUBLE HOAX! THE RED KRYPTONITE IN "CLARK KENT'S" TOP HAT ALLOWED ME TO OVERCOME THE EFFECTS OF BIZARRO MXYZPTLK'S MAGIC, AND OUR APPEARANCE SIDE BY SIDE AT THE COSTUME BALL TAUGHT HER A LESSON ABOUT SNOOPING!"

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Whenever a team has a guy named "Prof" or "the Professor" on board, you know the rest of the group are bound to be a bit on the dim side. Professor Mark "Prof" Haley led the Challengers of the Unknown, and former prizefighter Rocky Davis was the dumbest of three dummies who followed him around, if only by virtue of his punch drunkenness. In Challengers of the Unknown #48, the team was checking in on and feeding their enemies, the League of Challenger-Haters, whom they were holding captive on a hidden island prison. When Rocky steps off the jet onto the barren, lifeless soil of the island, and sees a fluffy, white, cotton-tailed bunny rabbit looking up at him with it's bright eyes and twitching whiskers, he questions nothing, and sweeps the bunny up in a loving embrace. If this were any ordinary bunny, Rocky would pet it and stroke it and hug it until it stops moving, just like all his other soft pets; but brother, this is no ordinary bunny!

And so the Challengers of the Unknown were dead forever. No, not really. The Prof figured out that the "magic" compound that Multi-Man used to save Rocky earlier was a simple acid compound, found in powder form in Multi-Man's cell and applied liberally. Then they teamed up with the Doom Patrol in a crossover that continued into Doom Patrol #102.

By the way, that League of Challenger-Haters sure do hate the Challengers, don't they? What a zany bunch. Someone should do an article about them.